Until Dec. 13, 1993. On that day, Olathe superintendent Ron Wimmer unilaterally ordered the book removed from the high school library.

Wimmer said he made his decision in order to "avoid controversy." In preceding months, "Annie On My Mind" had been the target of protests by religious fundamentalists, and the book had been burned on the steps outside the Kansas City School District offices. Wimmer's action did anything but avoid controversy, however. Student petitions calling for the book's reinstatement, rancorous public hearings, and a lawsuit ensued. The School Board in Olathe, a city of 64,000 people 25 miles south of Kansas City, MO, backed Wimmer's decision. It argued that the schools had a legitimate pedagogical right to teach students that homosexuality is wrong.

Almost two years later, on Nov. 29, 1995, the matter was settled when Federal Judge G. Thomas Van Bebber ruled that the book was removed because the board and superintendent "disagreed with ideas expressed in the book," not because the book lacked educational merit. Van Bebber ruled that the banning was an unconstitutional attempt to "prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion."

Few challenges to books in our public schools are quite so dramatic. But the controversy over "Annie On My Mind" nonetheless highlights a reality facing teachers and school districts across the country. Censorship is alive and well. Further, it is sometimes part of a larger campaign by conservative or religious fundamentalist groups to impose their particular curriculum focus on public schools and to build support for public school alternatives such as vouchers.

"[T]he urge to censor is hardly the monopoly of any political group," notes the American Civil Liberties Union. "But the greatest threat today comes from the fundamentalist right, with its ideological hostility to other religious or philosophical systems, to homosexuality, to sex education, and indeed to the basic idea of secular education."